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In 1948, fifteen-year-old Trond spends the summer with his father at a cabin near the Swedish border. His friend Jon leaves a loaded rifle within reach, and Jon's younger twin brother Lars accidentally shoots and kills his twin, Odd.
Trond's father tells him that a person decides for himself when he will be hurt. Stoic control over pain lets someone endure, but the same discipline lets them go numb: they withhold feeling and explanation from others, and the cost passes to those left behind. Trond inherits the maxim and uses it to justify his own withdrawal from people in old age.
A single formative period can become the fixed point that a whole later life quietly orbits. Decades of marriage, work and fatherhood can feel thinner in memory than a few weeks at fifteen. Read this way, deliberate solitude in old age is not a fresh start but a return, since the person chooses surroundings that recreate the original scene so they can finally examine it.
When a child later discovers what the adults were really doing, such as wartime danger, an affair or a planned departure, every remembered moment gets recoded. Scenes he experienced as simple closeness with his father turn out to have been partly staged around something hidden. Trond is left owning two versions of the same summer that cannot be reconciled.